Page 24 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

“Or what?” he asked.

“He mentioned the curb,” Sierra said, and rolled her eyes. “Knowing him, he’s probably not going to wait that long. And it will probably be the dump.”

And Boone decided in that moment that there was absolutely nothing on this earth more critical than making sure that Sierra had no further connection to Matty Quealey. He nodded toward the truck. “Let’s go.”

She looked startled again. “Go where?”

“Sierra. Let’s go get your stuff. Let’s not give him an opportunity to turn this into another one of his little circus sideshows.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“Besides,” Boone said, and he let himself smile, “I don’t think Matty and I have had a heart to heart in a good long while.”

Sierra laughed at that and he immediately felt better about snapping at her, not that he would have taken that back if he could. Because either way he had the taste of her in his mouth and he imagined he’d be living off that for a while.

Maybe for the rest of his life.

“Are you going to get in a fight with him?” she asked.

But she only sounded mildly curious.

“You know he’s afraid to get a fight with me,” Boone told her. “Or he would have. About a thousand times already.”

“I feel like I should be the liberated, independent woman I am now and tell you that I can handle this on my own,” Sierra said then, very seriously. “But I don’t actually want him to throw all my stuff into the street. And I don’t think that it would be all that easy to gather it up by myself. And most of all? Matty has always been afraid of you, whatever he might like to call it to make himself feel better.” She smiled. “So yes, Boone, I would love your company. The company of my best friend on what’s supposed to be a difficult day. Even though, if I’m being honest, it doesn’t really feel all that difficult.”

He could see a kind of storm in her gaze when said that, clouding up all that green, and he expected it wasn’t the divorce that was bothering her. It wasn’t the divorce was making this day complicated.

Or it wasn’tjustthe divorce.

But he wasn’t about to make that easier for her.

“Let’s go,” he said again.

He swung in his truck and texted his brothers to tell them that he was making a run into Marietta. He didn’t tell them why. Not that it was a secret, but he could already hear the commentary. Given that he didn’t entirely believe that Sierra was finally leaving Matty for good, divorce or no divorce, he wasn’t about to tell his nosy brothers that he was going and moving her out of her house and fully into his. Or his barn—same difference.

That was little different than her taking a summer off, and he didn’t need his brothers to point that out.

Sierra climbed in the passenger seat, closed the heavy door, and clicked her seatbelt into place. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, the silence between them felt… awkward. Or not easy, anyway.

Notnormal.

He didn’t do anything to fix that, either. They drove down from the ranch, following the dirt roads that led to the hill where the Lodge sat. As they came over the crest of that hill, Cowboy Point was there before them, looking pretty as a picture in the bright July sunshine.

“Seems like you’re fitting in well up here,” he said.

Beside him, Sierra seem to jolt to attention, which was interesting. When he glanced over, she had that furrow in her forehead and it looked like she was biting her nails, though he knew she didn’t actuallybitethem anymore. Her marriage had broken that unsightly habit. Now she just worried her nails with her teeth.

“I like it here,” she said quietly.

Like it was a sacred vow that probably shouldn’t have been spoken out loud.

His problem was, it felt like it to him, too.

As they headed out of Cowboy Point the road got steep again, leading them up toward the peak of Copper Mountain before it took a turn to the east and started a series of switchbacks that had led generations of locals to call this road Desolation Drive.

So it seemed like the perfect time to hard launch a few questions he’d been sitting on for the past sixteen years.

“How the hell did you stay married this long to that guy?” he asked. Not furiously. Not loudly.

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